It's not a gay western, it's a gay soap opera.
At the beginning of Brokeback Mountain, two 19-year-olds, a ranchhand named Ennis del Mar (Heath Ledger) and a rodeo rider named Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal), hire on to tend a herd of sheep in Wyoming for the summer. Off alone in the rugged, mountainous terrain they start having sex with each other and, though they don't realize it, fall in love. It's 1963 and these boys from the middle of nowhere have no way to assimilate what they feel for each other. When they separate at the end of the job Ennis is so overcome he collapses in an alley with the dry heaves. No wonder: when he was a child there were two men living on a nearby ranch together; one of them was beaten to death with a tire iron and sexually mutilated. Ennis's father, who may have taken part in the crime, took his son to see the corpse as a warning that has spooked him ever since. In '63 Ennis and Jack aren't even at a point at which they can contemplate doing something about their feelings and consciously reject that option—they both marry and have kids because it's the only imaginable course. Four years later, however, Jack passes through Ennis's teensy town and they reconnect; from then on they start taking "fishing trips" several times a year to be together.…
Article comments
26 - reggie von woic
Anyone see the VH1 special on the movie some time last week? Ledger was wearing dark sunglasses and was looking down during the whole thing.
I should mention that this was an indoor interview.
27 - Alan Dale
Thanks, Aaman, for the invite. E-mail me so we can discuss it further.
28 - Jennifer
excellent review!!
As a straight lady, I agreed with everything you said about personal responsibility. Even if I wanted to root for this romance (and I would, had these men remained single or just with each other), the bitter taste of their irresponsible actions leave me feeling as empty as though I were watching a movie about a STRAIGHT extra-marital affair. This movie feels "icky"- not because of the gay theme, of course. Because of the fact that these mens' action make them non-sympathetic in my eyes.
It was hard to be gay back then, but is the ONLY course available to a gay man to decieve a woman and pump out a few kids, all while being disengaged, treating your family like a nuisance (at best) and like dirt (at worst)? What about living as a confirmed bachelor? There have always been men who have not married. The bald truth is, like any adulterer, these men want the comforts of wives and family but also the excitement of their lovers, and are too cowardly and selfish to leave such security behind. I would say this about ANYone, man or woman, gay or straight, that saw lovers on the side and hurt their families.
I am waiting for the true gay love story. A story where two lovers discover their passion, unmarred by angst, lies and general bad feelings. The uplifting, feel-good life-confirming gay love. You know, like the millions of movies about straight couples out there??
29 - Alan Dale
Hey Jennifer,
Thank you for the praise and the comment. As for a true gay love story--I like Brian Sloan's 1998 indie romantic comedy I Think I Do a lot. (I wrote about it here.) At the same time, I don't mind showing protagonists who engage in objectionable behavior, as long as the movie doesn't sentimentalize them. I'm all for eyes-wide-open naturalism. There's no denying that Ennis and Jack couldn't have easily lived openly together back then, if at all. But tragedy would be possible only if they were seen to be responsible for their actions--double binds are essential to tragedy.
Thanks again for writing.
30 - Alan Dale
This is a response to Comment #15 from Jennifer Adam: The key difference between the story and movie is that whereas Proulx treats Ennis and Jack objectively, as other people out there doing what they do, the movie presents them for us to identify with. This softens the treatment because we're urged not only to understand them from the inside, but to make excuses for them as well, the way we all have the (bad) habit of making excuses for ourselves. The movie's idea of showing the consequences of Ennis's bad behavior is to show how badly he treats his girlfriend and then to have her cry so we feel sorry for her as well. I've said it before on this page, but there's more to narrative than feeling sorry for people!
31 - jennifer
hi Alan,
thanks! I love your writing style. It's at once lucid and all willy-nilly, which is exactly how my own brain operates.
I do want to clarify that I do agree with you when you say you don't mind movies that take a hard stance and show uneasy material. Me either. Movies don't have to be squeaky clean. If the movie had retained Proulx's unabashed objectivity, in "Yep, that's what happened", then the movie might have felt less "icky". But Ang I think attempted to go for a Sacred Love For All the Ages These Guys are SAINTS motif.
Even though the two movies are nothing alike, I have to compare it to Jack and Rose on Titanic (and hey, one even dies here too). Cameron presented it as though we should be awe-struck at the DEEP love these two share. He presented it as something so sacred as to be unquestioned (their romance was less "icky" because the movie made her fiancee into a caricature of prick-ness who you wouldn't possibly root for). But really, take away the Titanic, the tragic disaster and the period costumes and it's a really silly love story.
Another small complaint about BBM is that not ONE straight man was at all redeemable in the film. As though ALL straight men hate gays and are bigots, and hey, they might even kill you. It was the same "caricature of prick-ness" they used to color Rose's fiancee. It's a tactic to emotionally manipulate. It forces you to root for the characters the movie WANTS you to. At least they were kinder in their portrayal of the wives....
32 - jennifer
oh BTW thanks for the film recommendation! I'll check it out.
33 - Alan Dale
Thanks, Jennifer, especially for "lucid." As for "all willy nilly," the term I use is "impressionistic" but I know what you mean. (As willy nilly as it may seem in print it's been subjected to a lot of discipline!) What you say about Titanic makes sense; at least Brokeback Mountain starts from Annie Proulx. The thing that killed me about Titanic is that they had a thousand odd people on board and absolutely no interest in anyone but Jack and Rose. The disproportion was crushing. As for the treatment of the wives in Brokeback Mountain, the actresses, and the audience, might have had more fun if their characters had been bitches. If you're gonna make a soap opera, why hold back? Thanks again.
34 - Jim
Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
You make this comment: (This is hardest on Michelle Williams as Ennis's wife Alma. Proulx didn't seek to make Alma an independently interesting figure. She's just the dead end Ennis goes down because he believes he has to, which doesn't give an actress much to work with.)
Alma is no dead end. She is Ennis's wife with whom he had two children and as such created a family that he lived with for many years. You also say he does this because he believes he has to. I'll call it the Brokeback Disease, which is very common. How many gay men marry a woman and have a family because they feel they have to? They feel they have to, to make their sacrifice upon the alter of normalcy. They have to live a straight life and be closeted to gain the community's respect, to gain stability in their life to have a family, to keep a job, to achieve the things in life that are denied to gay men all over this country, in every community. This is also done to escape things that are always part of a gay man's life: living under the shadow of the tire iron as you say in your review, living under the tire iron of AIDS, living under housing and job discrimination and more.
I also want to understand the Brokeback Disease better. In your review and in several responses to it from other writers the word morality was mentioned. A gay man marrying is not the same thing as a straight man marrying and having adulterous affairs. If a gay married man would have an affair with another woman it would be the same. But if a gay man has an affair with another man, its different. Its different because the gay man makes a tragic decision to get married and to deny his being, his nature. He makes this choice probably for many of the reasons I mentioned in the preceding paragraph. This is a choice probably made with great fear and trembling which lasts through out his life. Can he live up to his choice? Can it ever be successful? It probably will not be totally successful, but it can be more or less. And what a burden it is. It must be carried his whole life. There is also the issue of how many gay men make this decision to marry. Hundreds of thousand? Millions? How many are successful? How many wives never will know? How many find out like Alma and suffer until the end or until divorce? How many love their gay husbands and would never divorce them because they are good fathers and just a good person? Is this great aspect of the human adventure immoral? God, I hope not!
You also make this comment: And I think gay people may experience it tragically, though even they would have to admit it lacks one of the elements of tragedy, in that Ennis and Jack are not responsible for the bad outcome. They're victims, not tragic heroes, and they're not held accountable for anything, not even how they treat their wives, because, we're to understand, they have no choice.
I disagree with this. First of all, Ennis is held accountable for the way he treats Alma. She ends up divorcing him. That's a pretty big accountability. Also, you say that we are to understand that both Jack and Ennis have no choice and therefore one of the elements of tragedy is missing. Are you saying they had no choice in the paths their lives took? They chose to live a straight, closeted life because they were straight or so they thought. I believe Ennis could not accept that he was gay until late into his relationship with Jack and maybe only after Jack was taken from him. “Jack, I swear.”, he said at the end. At this point he truly recognized what his love for Jack really was. Both were faced with choices through out their love. Each chose differently. Jack chose to make a life with Ennis; Ennis chose to deny that possibility. Jack chose to be more out of the closet than discretion would allow and suffered the consequences of that choice. Ennis chose to stay in the closet and must suffer the loneliness and sadness of forever losing Jack which resulted from that choice. To me, this is great tragedy.
35 - Alan Dale
Hey Jim,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. Here are my responses:
I didn't say closeted gay men's wives are dead ends, I said that's how the movie presents Alma. The movie doesn't give you any sense of what Ennis is missing out on with her, b/c it's totally devoted to making you feel what he's missing out on with Jack. You talk about Alma as if she were a person who had more life than what we see onscreen. She's a character in a fictional movie"all we see is all there is.
In fact, your entire discussion involves projecting onto the movie. You engage in some interesting sociological speculation, but though the moviemakers, unlike Annie Proulx, invite the audience to project onto the story in this way, the movie doesn't do anything with such speculation. We have no more idea than Ennis and Jack do how many more gay guys are out there in Wyoming or what the others do about it.
As for cheating on your wife and lying to her, yes, it's always immoral, no matter what the sex of your partner is. That doesn't mean we can't understand why someone would do it, and even identify with his bad behavior, but cheating and lying are in themselves inescapably bad behavior.
And as for the "great tragedy" of Ennis and Jack's story, you don't describe it as something I recognize as literary tragedy. You describe it as pathos, the commonplace sense of something that's really, really sad. Literary tragedy involves more heroic action on the part of the tragic protagonist, so that we feel he's attempting as much as can be attempted in the situation given his character. And tragedy also has a visionary exaltation that takes us right up the door of death and suggests what's on the other side that has such a mysterious influence on our lives. Saying that "society won't let them be together" doesn't make it tragedy, even if it's true.
Thanks again for writing.
36 - jennifer
jim-you say that cheating on your wife is okay if you are a gay man "trapped" into the straight world?
Cheating is wrong, no matter what. Regardless of whether someone feels they "have" to conform, the truth is they really don't. Often our "prisons" are in our own minds. A man does not HAVE to pretend he is straight and decieve a woman.
It's the same logic my unhappily married aunt used to cheat on her husband. She did not love him, but only married him because she was into her 30's and "society" said she should get married. He did nothing for her sexually, and one night she confided in me that she wanted to have a lover on the side. She claimed that she deserved to be happy, that she had sacrificed what she wanted in order to make her mother and the rest of society happy. I told her it was wrong, and if she really didn't love him, to divorce him. Doesn't HE deserve to be freed so that he can find someone who really loves him rather than have a wife pretending to be in love with him?? What my aunt wanted was childish and selfish. She didn't want to leave her husband's paycheck and security and companionship. Or the apparent "normalcy" of being married.
Put yourself in an Alma's shoes: she hears this man promise to love and cherish her, she bears his children. But, she also suffers extreme pain. Imagine having a spouse who was distant and cold, who you KNEW wasn't sexually attracted to you. An Alma would think it was all her, that maybe she was undesirable or not a good enough wife. All those years wasted, knowing this man can't really stand the sight of you but not knowing why. Then imagine her "Ennis" telling her that he is perfectly justified in cheating on her all these years, because she "trapped" him. But really, the wife is just as much of a victim of his inability to be honest with himself.
Maybe, a gay man in Ennis or Jack's shoes WOULD have faced abuse and discrimination had he chosen not to marry in the first place, even if he had kept his desires pretty closeted. But sometimes the RIGHT thing to do is not always the EASIEST or most comfortable.
That's what I told my aunt. It won't be easy or comfortable to divorce her husband, but it is the right thing to do.
37 - Alan Dale
Hey Jennifer,
Interesting about your aunt. "sometimes the RIGHT thing to do is not always the EASIEST or most comfortable" puts the issue well.
I still feel that we're talking about the characters in the movie as if they were real people--"Put yourself in an Alma's shoes." It's fascinating to me how we have that urge, and with naturalism like Proulx's it makes perfect sense b/c she's fabricating something in the way of data. With a romance like Lee's movie, however, there's an invitation to do project, but it doesn't make nearly as much sense. Projecting blurs the experience on the screen. This may be why it's turning out to be so popular. People love the movie precisely b/c it's about whatever they want it to be about, it's about themselves.
38 - L
Sorry, I guess we're not allowed to link.